Workshop and Exhibition on Promoting Productivity and Market Access Technologies and Approaches to Improve Farm Income and Livelihoods in Ethiopia: Lessons from Action research projects

As you all know, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has been responsible, with our research and development partners, for implementing several action research projects in Ethiopia, Mali and Kenya. These projects have been conducting research that combines systematically planned development interventions with carefully designed research protocols to evaluate the outcomes of interventions, generate lessons for scaling and, in the process, refine available technologies and practices into best-fits for smallholders’ specific conditions.

ILRI has organized a workshop and exhibition from the 8th to the 9th of December 2016 to share the experiences and lessons generated by these projects with the wider development and research community in Ethiopia. The workshop will feature presentations from the three major action research projects that ILRI is managing in Ethiopia; namely, the Livestock and Irrigation Value Chains for Ethiopian Smallholders (LIVES), Putting Nitrogen Fixation to Work for Smallholder Farmers in Africa (N2Africa), Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation (Africa RISING).

Representatives from our Feed The Future (FtF) project in Mali and the Accelerated Value Chain Development (AVCD) project from Kenya will also participate.

An exhibition has been organized to showcase the various technologies introduced by the projects and their capacity to improve production and productivity and manage natural resources. The exhibition will be open for you all to view after 3pm on Thursday, December 8th and will be open all day Friday, December 9th as well. You are all most welcome to get a first-hand look at some of the technologies that have been very successful during the life of these projects.

Azage Tegegne (on behalf of the organizing committee)